Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.

Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

I can answer that only by hearsay, returned the Guide, for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain suffering to me as I would find it to reveal to you the secrets of the Mountain people. But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer; and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want.

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.